Introducing: Resimpulse
Impulse: What does it really mean?…
…Was the exact thought when this topic was given to us as a group. Well, again with my trusty team mates Sidhvi Gandikota, Zoha Azmi and I, Madhura Pathare started contemplating on this word. But let’s be real, who needs deep thoughts when we have trusty ol’ Wikipedia to turn to?
I then began doing my individual research on Wikipedia, just so I get an overall idea about the meaning. As per wikipedia ‘impulse’ or ‘impulsivity’ means is a tendency to act on a whim, displaying behavior characterized by little or no forethought, reflection, or consideration of the consequences. Impulsive actions are typically “poorly conceived, prematurely expressed, unduly risky, or inappropriate to the situation that often result in undesirable consequences
Basically you during a Christmas or black Friday sale on Steam, buying multiple games because it’s cheap but might end up not playing all of them my wallet is crying in the corner
Thirsty for inspiration
Now that the topic for the game is set, we started researching themes for the game. One which struck to us was ‘Vampires’
#TeamEdward Am I right?
We looked into several vampire related inspirations such as Vampire Diaries, Twilight, which personally was my first introduction to the ‘vampire genre’, Dracula book and so on.
After much deliberation, our brilliant team decided to focus on Dracula – the king of all vampires and the star of Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic, ‘DRACULA.’ A quick Google search confirmed that the Dracula universe is in the public domain, so it’s game on!
Furthermore, my team mate exposed me and my other team mate to the action role-playing game Vampyr, which explores the concept of humanity and human relations through the story of a doctor who turns into a vampire. Later, we came to a conclusion that we develop choice based narrative game inspired by the Vampyr narrative.
The team also drew inspiration from the Life is Strange series, which utilizes a choice system and focuses on the interactions between the protagonist and NPCs.
Additionally, the team was inspired by the narrative adventure role-playing game Pentiment, developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by XBOX game studios, which tells the story of a journeyman artist investigating a murder in 16th century Bavaria. This game’s art style and no combat-evolved storyline inspired the team to create a video game with similar art style.
In this the art style is a beautiful mix of medieval paintings and simple 2-D characters as well as object forms. This helped us in setting the character design and animation style for the game.
We then focused on developing the narrative. Without offending anyone, especially the ‘vampires’(we don’t want them to come for our blood) we tried to preserve (pun intended) the Dracula’s OG characteristics but in a modern day setting keeping the medieval story intact. We discussed various modern day places to set the story in like Paris, New York and so on, but then we thought why not Kingston in the UK? It’s pretty much a modern town with a blend of history within it. This made for an interesting narrative which I thought was probably the best of both worlds.
In conclusion, my team was inspired by various sources including popular vampire franchises, action role-playing games, and narrative adventure games. We aimed to develop a choice-based narrative game based on the story of Dracula, set in modern-day Kingston in the UK. Our game’s art style and character design is a beautiful blend of medieval paintings and simple 2-D forms. Our team’s focus was to preserve the original characteristics of Dracula while presenting it in a modern setting. We hope to bring a unique and captivating experience to the players, stay tuned for our upcoming blog to see what we came up with in regards to narration and character set-up.